The age of dot.com TV is upon us. “Quarterlife,” developed for the Internet, will premiere Tuesday night on NBC. Created by TV veterans Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, the series debuted in eight-minute Webisodes on November 11, 2007 and was snapped up by NBC a week later. With the writers’ strike just two weeks old at the time, the network badly needed alternative programming and “quarterlife,” with its cast of smart, sexy and whiny twenty-somethings, fit the bill.

The series bears similarities to the duo’s other angst-ridden dramas, “thirtysomething,” “My So-Called Life,” and “Once and Again.” Each show targeted – and the more successful helped define – a generation. Those shows appealed to teens and people in their thirties and forties. “Quarterlife” explores those who are no longer adolescents but aren’t quite adults.

“If you talk about people in their twenties today, a lot of these people do know what they want to do and are very passionate about it,” says Herskovitz. “A lot of them are actually very entitled about what they want to do and in fact, are amazed that the world is not letting them do it sooner.”

The series was first developed as a pilot for ABC, but Herskovitz and Zwick weren’t happy with its execution. “In the midst of re-conceiving it, it started to be more and more a story about the Internet. Ed and I decided that we shouldn’t even try to do it as a television show.”

And so “quarterlife” plays like a voyeuristic peek into the lives of people you might overhear at some Williamsburg bar. The characters mount video blogs, check video messages, and never stop texting each other. The show’s main character is an aspiring writer named Dylan who keeps a candid video blog on a multimedia social network called – you guessed it- quarterlife.com.

“Dylan is incredibly observant. She’s fascinated by human behavior,” says Bitsie Tulloch, who plays Dylan. “My character has this compulsion to tell the truth.”

Tulloch, 27, met Herskovitz when they both served jury duty. She told him she was an actress. When Marshall later went to see a play in Los Angeles called “Quarterlife,” to see if its plot clashed with his idea, he saw Tulloch again and Herskovitz knew he had found his star.

He surrounded Dylan with friends who all want the glamorous, creative jobs that are always in short supply. Beautiful Lisa (Maite Schwartz) longs to be an actress but has stage fright. Jed (Scott Michael Foster) and Danny (David Walton) want to be filmmakers, but are stuck making car commercials.

A real-life, parallel social network exists at quarterlife.com. which has received six-million page views. Fans mount their own blogs and videos about the show and “interact” with the characters on the show. as if they were friends. On occasion, cast members respond.

If it all sounds a little bit lonely, Herskovitz agrees. “I’ve been astonished at what I see on the Web site’s forums, the number of people who feel isolated,” he says. “The Internet has allowed people who feel alienated or isolated to reveal themselves in ways they couldn’t before.”

To celebrate its hip quotient, MTV is going to air a 20-minute preview of the series the same day it debuts on NBC. For a veteran like Herskovitz, there’s an enormous sense of satisfaction.

“We have complete creative control. NBC doesn’t even know what the stories are about until they get the episodes,” he says. “That’s never happened literally in the history of television.”